The summer theatrical highlight in Bath for some years now has been the Peter Hall Company season at the Theatre Royal. However, with the main house dark until September for refurbishment, the management have been forced to turn to the substitutes’ bench to stage two in-house productions at the adjacent Ustinov studio.
This alternative programme is launched in impressive style by Julian Mitchell’s resourceful adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s seminal 20th-century novel of marital infidelity and eventual tragedy. The narrative is an earlier manifestation of some of F Scott Fitzgerald’s twenties jazz era themes of decaying social and moral values, but with a European rather than an American setting.
The protagonists are Edward Ashburnham, played by John Hopkins, a sort of Great Gatsby figure whose generous nature is flawed by a caddish and unfeeling approach to women, his wife Leonora (Flora Montgomery), at once cold and calculating yet hugely vulnerable and their American friends, Philadelphia prude John Dowell (Jonathan Forbes) and his promiscuous wife Florence (Jennifer Woodward).
All four players outline their characters’ fault lines with great clarity, especially as they come under the increasing influence of Lisa Kerr’s innocent former convent pupil Nancy. Their sexual encounters are played out as a stately minuet of constantly changing partners, while director Matthew Lloyd ensures that Ford’s targets of the gulf between perceived respectability and brutal reality, the pressures of religious belief, and the stresses and strains of Edwardian society are there for all to see.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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